Technical Field
Embodiments of the invention relate generally to patient monitoring and, more specifically, to a system and method of automatically adjusting event detection and alarm generation sensitivity settings of a patient monitoring system.
Discussion of Art
Patient monitoring systems include electronic monitoring devices designed to display physiological information about a patient. Electrocardiogram (ECG), electroencephalogram (EEG), plethysmographic signals, and signals related to blood pressure, temperature, and respiration represent typical physiological information contained in monitoring devices. Patient monitoring systems are typically also furnished with alarming functionality to alert clinicians of important physiological events that may impact a patient being monitored. Such systems maintain alarm configuration settings that are used to determine when an alarm event is triggered by the devices.
As will be readily appreciated, the sensitivity of the event detection and alarm generation mechanism is a key attribute of patient monitoring systems because insufficient sensitivity can result in missed events, and overly sensitive systems can lead to alarm fatigue. Alarm fatigue is the condition in which clinicians at medical institutions become desensitized to clinical alarms because of the high probability that the alarms are not of actual clinical significance. Most event detection systems, therefore, provide a sensitivity setting to allow clinical users to tune the detection in a way that gives the desired clinical performance for each patient. For example, the alarm configuration settings typically include threshold limits and priority levels that can be customized by the clinicians or caregivers based on the acuity of the patient and monitoring needs. Clinicians typically desire more sensitive event detection when dealing with acute patients, and they are willing to reduce the sensitivity in favor of fewer alarms for patients who are less acute. However, clinicians may sometimes ignore these manually adjustable sensitivity controls and instead rely on the default settings, or forget to adjust the sensitivity controls on a periodic basis as the patient's condition changes; therefore, existing systems may not perform as well as they could.
In view of the above, it is desirable to provide a system and related method that is configured to automatically prompt a user to adjust, or to automatically adjust, the event detection and alarm generation sensitivity settings of a patient monitoring system.